A rotten core 26 August 2013

Early one morning in March 1993, ‘Narora’ came close to joining
Chernobyl and Fukushima in the annals of industrial civilisation. Two
blades broke off the turbine at the nuclear reactor near this town in
Uttar Pradesh, India. The destabilised machine began to shake, damaging
nearby cooling pipes that released hydrogen gas, which then caught fire.
At the same time, lubricant oil leaked and fed the flames, which spread
through the turbine building, causing an electricity blackout in the
entire power plant. The control room filled with smoke, so that
operators had to shut down the reactor and leave the vicinity.

Even after shutdown, however, the reactor continued to generate heat
because of radioactive elements in its core. In March 2011, similar
heating occurred after an earthquake and tsunami disabled cooling
systems at the Fukushima reactor in Japan, causing the core to melt and
expelling massive quantities of radioactive material into the
surroundings. Fortunately, operators in Narora averted a similar release
by circulating water intended for firefighting to carry away excess
heat from the core.

Yet another danger remained, however: the reactor could spontaneously
become ‘critical’ because of neutrons emitted by the radioactive
materials, which meant that at any moment it could again start
generating immense quantities of heat. In that case, the core would
suddenly melt and react with the coolant, resulting in an explosion. So
some Narora operators grabbed flashlights and, risking their lives,
climbed onto the top of the reactor building to manually open valves
that released liquid boron into the core. Boron absorbs neutrons: the
core could no longer turn critical, and this heroic action averted a
potential catastrophe.

No one has ever named, let alone celebrated, these workers – perhaps
because India’s nuclear elite prefers to elide just how close a call
Narora was. “You must remember that as far as nuclear reactor is
concerned, there was no problem at Narora,” the chairman of the Atomic
Energy Commission (AEC), Chidambaram, said to an interviewer in 1993,
“The reactor worked perfectly according to design.” Such claims of total
technical control leave no room for the heroism of the lowly saving the
day. Some years later, Chidambaram asserted confidently: “there is no
possibility of any nuclear accident in the near or distant future in
India.”

To be sure, India has not yet suffered a Chernobyl or a Fukushima. But
as M V Ramana meticulously and exhaustively documents in his treatise The Power of Promise,
lesser accidents (which the authorities dismiss as “incidents”) are
routine, and several of these have had the potential to become
catastrophic. A physicist currently employed at the Nuclear Future
Laboratory and the Programme on Science and Global Security, both at
Princeton University in the US, Ramana is a rare asset: an independent
and knowledgeable expert who has been dissecting India’s nuclear
programme for decades. With flaws persisting in older nuclear reactors
and untested, unfamiliar designs being deployed in the new imported
ones, Ramana shows that a serious accident could be only a matter of
time.

The delusions

If the majority of Indians are unaware of the risks, it may be because
they have been always kept in the dark about nuclear matters. Ramana
demonstrates that the nuclear establishment in India has insulated
itself from the people it purports to serve by means of a culture of
secrecy and mendacity that obscures the true fiscal, environmental and
human cost of nuclear energy. By publishing The Power of Promise, he has opened the windows of a long-shuttered room and let the sunlight stream in.

Darkness was always necessary to nurturing India’s nuclear programme.
In the 1950s, physicist Homi Bhabha used his friendship with prime
minister Jawaharlal Nehru to propose the construction of “a very small
and high powered body” to direct India’s nuclear ambitions, “composed
of, say, three people with executive power, and answerable directly to
the Prime Minister without any intervening link.” Only such an exclusive
arrangement could ensure the secrecy that nuclear affairs required,
Bhabha successfully argued. The resulting Atomic Energy Commission
(AEC), which oversees the civilian nuclear programme, reports directly
to the prime minister’s office and functions without parliamentary
oversight, as does its subordinate body, the Department of Atomic Energy
(DAE), which operates most nuclear facilities. The secrecy and impunity
that Bhabha won for these agencies enabled him and his successors to
sustain the twin delusions of affordability and safety on which the
programme rests.

Right at the start, Bhabha fudged the accounting to falsely claim that
within ten years nuclear power would become cheaper than coal in most of
India. Such deceptions have now become routine, and to that end the
nuclear agencies often omit key financial data from reports. For
instance, the DAE refused to explain the costing of heavy water, used in
some reactors, even to the Comptroller and Auditor General, on the plea
that it was “not advisable to divulge” information on “strategic”
materials (although heavy water is not used in defense). After being
stymied several times in such a manner, the Parliamentary Public
Accounts Committee concluded that the DAE was invoking concerns of
security merely as “a way of evading accountability”. The department
nonetheless persisted with its suspect practices, explaining revealingly
that such accounting was necessary “to make nuclear power competitive
with other forms of energy.”

In truth, nuclear plants provide expensive electricity: in 2011-2012,
the Department of Energy’s proposed budget was INR 93.52 billion, after
accounting for all the revenues it expected to receive. In comparison,
the budget for renewable energy was almost eight times smaller, although
that sector produced almost five times the energy, in absolute terms.
As for the new, imported nuclear plants, the price tag is crippling: in a
recent paper in the Economic and Political Weekly, physicist
Suvrat Raju and Ramana calculate that the six French reactors to be
built in Jaitapur, Maharashtra, will cost a staggering INR 3.6 lakh
crore, or around USD 70 billion. And that’s without counting the costs
of potential accidents.

The nuclear establishment has also gone to extraordinary lengths to
conceal information on another matter: safety. For instance, the DAE
never shares its emergency plans with locals (who are the ones who need
to know what to do in case of an accident), does not reveal the health
records of its workers (who are routinely exposed to radiation), does
not even monitor the health of temporary workers, often migrants (who
are reportedly used for jobs entailing high exposure to radiation and
then packed off to their distant homes), and never reveals the
quantities of radioactive substances released into the environment by
accidents or routine operations. “This means that one cannot
independently calculate the radiation doses to which the inhabitants of
areas near these facilities might be exposed,” Ramana notes. In 1991, a
well-designed study documented elevated levels of cancers, congenital
deformities, miscarriages, still births, and infant deaths among
villagers living near the Rajasthan Atomic Power Station in Chittorgarh
district, proving that residence by a nuclear power plant entails real
suffering.

‘Smaller violations’

Another means of maintaining secrecy and, thereby, public illusions
about safety is to silence whistleblowers. In June 1994, it rained so
hard in southern Gujarat that water from Motichar Lake entered the
adjacent turbine and reactor buildings in the nuclear facility at
Kakrapar. Workers on the morning shift had to swim through chest-deep
water; electricity supply from the grid failed and the back-up diesel
generator had to be turned on; and the flood water carried out canisters
of radioactive waste that, astoundingly, have never been accounted for.
The water also submerged pumps used to cool the reactor core.
Serendipitously, following the Narora accident, reactors throughout
India had been shut down for months to inspect their turbine blades.
Otherwise, the situation could easily have become catastrophic. Local
villagers, who were rightly worried about the safety of their families,
came to the rescue by breaching the lake’s embankment and allowing the
water to drain out.

All this is known only because Manoj Mishra, an employee at the plant, wrote a letter to the newspaper Gujarat Samachar describing
what had happened. He was fired, and went on to spend close to two
decades fighting his case in various courts. This April, the Supreme
Court ruled that Mishra was not entitled to the protections normally
extended to a whistleblower because he was only a worker with limited
education, not an engineer or a nuclear expert, and because his action
was not “in furtherance of public good”. The court went on to explain
that the public good required the pursuit of nuclear energy, which it
deemed so valuable as to override “the smaller violation of right to
life”. In other words, the judges decreed that lives may be sacrificed
toward the end of providing nuclear power – proof of the frightening
prowess of the industry’s propagandists.

Globally, atomic energy is on the decline because of concerns about
safety and cost. In consequence, the major powers are aiding their
homegrown nuclear power companies by helping them sell to developing
countries. In 2008, George Bush and Manmohan Singh signed the landmark
Indo-US nuclear agreement, which allowed India to evade international
restrictions and thereby import uranium and nuclear reactors. France and
Russia went along with the deal, enabling India to join the exclusive
club of accepted nuclear powers. But prestige comes at a price. As Anil
Kakodkar, a former chairman of the AEC, explained in January 2011, the
US, France, and Russia had helped lift the prevailing sanctions against
India “and hence, for the nurturing of their business interests, we made
deals with them for nuclear projects.” The pricey new imports are being
sited at Koodankulam, at the southern tip of India (Russian reactors);
at Jaitapur in Maharashtra, near an earthquake faultline (French
reactors); at Kovvada in Andhra Pradesh and Mithi Virdi in Gujarat
(American reactors).

Yet the triad of powerful nations wanted more. A major deterrent to
nuclear power is the cost of a catastrophic accident: the Chernobyl
explosion alone has cost hundreds of billions of dollars. India,
therefore, came under intense pressure to protect nuclear suppliers from
financial losses in case of a mishap. The resulting Nuclear Liability
Act of 2010 limits the damages to be paid by nuclear operators and
suppliers to INR 1500 crores (currently approximately USD 250 million) –
a small fraction of the capital cost of a reactor and a minute fraction
of the potential cost of an accident. Even that was not enough to
satisfy the vendors’ powerful backers, however, so the Indian government
further weakened the provisions by executive fiat. The net result is
that in case of a catastrophic accident, almost the entire fiscal burden
will be borne by Indians – as will, of course, all the death and
despair. What is worse, as Ramana points out, the reactor suppliers now
have diminished incentive to ensure quality and safety.

A predecessor of the new imported reactors started up on 13 July at
Koodankulam, just by the Gulf of Mannar, one of the world’s richest
areas of marine biodiversity. The DAE had chosen this site decades
earlier for two Soviet nuclear reactors. Many locals, who live by
fishing, feared the destruction of their livelihoods: along with small
amounts of radioactive materials, nuclear power plants routinely emit
enormous quantities of hot water, which kills fish. Accordingly, in May
1989 the National Fish Workers Union organised a protest involving more
than 10,000 demonstrators. The police opened fire, but fortunately no
one died.

Although the Koodankulam project was shelved following the
disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1992, construction began in 2001
on two Russian reactors. And following the 2008 nuclear deal, India
promised to place two more at the same site. As the first imported
reactor to be commissioned in decades, the Koodankulam project is
regarded as proof of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s resolve to keep his
side of the bargain with the superpowers, and it has been pursued with
ferocity.

Following the Fukushima disaster, the people of Koodankulam desperately
tried to stop the plant’s construction, and suffered intense police
repression in return. Thousands of protesters, including children, now
face accusations of sedition and war against the Indian state – charges
that can lead to life imprisonment. At least two protesters have died,
foreign nationals who sought to support the agitation have been
deported, journalists are routinely intercepted and turned away, and
even bus services to the protesting villages have been stopped.

The fears of Koodankulam’s residents are well-founded. Ramana notes
that the new Russian reactors, called VVER-1000, are of a design that
has displayed persistent problems of a kind that can cause a severe
accident. Even more worrisome, earlier this year Russian prosecutors
arrested three officers of companies that had allegedly provided
defective equipment for several nuclear reactors, including those in
Koodankulam. And as if that were not enough, the new reactor design is
unfamiliar to Indian engineers, who have had problems building the plant
to specifications. The combination of lethal and inherently unstable
substances that explode unless maintained in exceedingly precise
conditions, defective design and possibly faulty equipment, a foreign
and poorly understood technology, plus a language barrier – these are a
formula for disaster, as should be clear from the Bhopal gas explosion
of 1984.

In May 2013, the Supreme Court denigrated concerns about the
Koodankulam reactors by declaring nuclear power to be “a clean, safe,
reliable, and competitive energy source.” The judges added: “Nobody on
the earth can predict what would happen in future and to a larger extent
we have to leave it to the destiny.” Thereby they abdicated any
responsibility for their own role in enabling whatever hardships are to
come. In stark contrast, The Power of Promise shows that when
things go wrong with such intrinsically dangerous technologies, it is
not destiny but human hubris and fallibility that are culpable. The book
is too informative to be an easy read; nevertheless it needs to be read
by everyone who cares about Indians, so that such dangerous delusions
can be dispelled by the bright light of day.

Note: Cost calculations in the article were made prior to the steep decline of the Indian Rupee.

~ Madhusree Mukherjee is the author of two books, Churchill's
Secret War (2010) and The Land of Naked People (2003), as well as a
science journalist and former physicist.

Nuclear power has been projected as the energy onwhich future growth will depend. But, it's neitherfeasible nor desirable...

By Anand Tandon | Mar 29, 2013

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to attend the book launchof "The Power of Promise" by MV Ramana. The book discussesNuclear Energy in India and its outlook – a subject that needsgreater public debate. In the context of an energy def... Continue reading...

NUCLEAR energy has been heralded as a magical solution to all of India’s energy woes and peoplehave been awaiting that magical unfolding of events for many a decade now. What has been sold to theordinary man as a dream for unlimited, clean and cheap energy has not been able to hit the markeven after much research and spending lots of money. The debate about nuclear energy... Continue reading...

Narayanasamy’s monthly promises of power
from the Koodankulam nuclear plant may be something of a joke in Tamil
Nadu. But the periodic promises served a function. They kept one section
of Tamil Nadu hopeful that commissioning Koodankulam will s...

Matters Nuclear -http://thestatesman.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=447892&catid=44The book makes a compelling argument why the nuclear energy programme has failed in the past and why its future is not as promising as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has made out... A review by sam rajappa

On February 18, 2013, I was interviewed by Nityanand Jayaraman at the Asian College of Journalism and we spoke about various aspects related to the book. The video of the interview and the transcripts are athttps://chaikadai.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/the-power-of-promise-examining-nuclear-energy-in-india/

After reading The Power of Promise, Ashwin Gambhir of Prayas emailed me saying "Managed to read it in 5 days flat which is testimony to how much I loved it. I am sure this book will become the essential reference on all things related to nuclear energy in India."